December 24th 2023 — House of Leaves re-read

At last I see myself in this house of god

From #children-of-night Discord channel.

I.

I've been properly re-reading MZD's House of Leaves for the last three days and surprisingly I don't feel like my brain or my soul has fried. 21st — Zampano's TNR and his sprawling footnotes. 22nd and 23rd — Johnny Truant's appends and edits. And I've read enough of Pelafina last year, year before to know. I just finished today. If anything I feel a sense of peace that reminds me of early COVID, what with pivoting from dramatization into problem-solving.

I went into this re-read with the belief that this book was not a book or a narrative at all but a record of conversation between 3 brilliant individuals, all with their own demons and lights and lives, and finished the work essentially confirming that. Johnny Truant is as real as Pelafina H. Lievre is as real as Zampano is as real as all the side characters sliding up and down the (pseudo)diegesis, and their parallels and calls to each other are trace evidence of contact. This is a pastiche and a collaboration and a hyperfiction and it is solid and if I'm eavesdropping I might as well whisper some things too.

https://twitter.com/ArchLeucoryx/status/1736953141382549789

It's incredible what more than 6, 7 years does to your comprehension. You see more. You know more. You begin to fit things to your own information and begin to converse with the author, the characters, the themes and motifs like they're tines on a xylophone. When I was younger I kept getting tripped up on the fine elements, the wording of things. I was crawling the labyrinth as the characters had. Now I can see it from above, and the labyrinth changes too. There's connections to linguistics and pop culture and the LA scene, but it also seems to project nicely into the future, seeming to predict confabulation/hallucination in large language models or the linkrot constantly gnawing at the internet. pg. 114: "Our perception of the labyrinth is thus intrinsically unstable: change your perspective and the labyrinth seems to change."

I also stopped seeing this work as a horror, a fossil of an eldritch philosophy. It does play tricks on you, yes, but only if you let it. Zampano's dry academic style is surprisingly neutral for the level of integration. Johnny's slide into decadence and madness is not emblematic of the innate horror of The Navidson Record but rather the way he has been internalizing the work; his sweet erudite corrections are his most lucid appends. Pelafina's love for Johnny outshines her madness. These characters all have limitations and liberations. They fend off their own individual labyrinths but as we see their labyrinths fit a single Platonic structure — a structure of communication, a guarantee that anything from whispers to shouts will be heard. And that is how I now understand it to be a love story. It's not a romance. But it does have a thread of love and memory and intent and that is what lets these individuals leave the labyrinth. They are in a postmodern story with postmodern themes with postmodern voices but not doomed to evaporate on the page. They are still relatively normal characters with a degree of object-level power that lets them sidestep the meta-level horrors. At the end of it all they still chop wood, carry water.

Perhaps the labyrinth/house/book was never a prison or an anechoic chamber at all. Maybe it was a transducer or a hyperlinking carrying signal. The austere structure of the house is still a structure and structure encodes a degree of meaning and intent no matter how rudimentary. The sound of the gunshot would've died in dozens of feet but it was carried, transmitted, like some kind of archaeological-artifactual-architectural wire. The house is nonagentic but seems to be agentic in the same way a mirror seems to know more than you know yourself.

pg. 166: "Knowledge of the terrain dramatically contracts this sense of distance." — The first time I read House of Leaves it took me over a week and a half. Still good, still fast, but naturally lengthy on account of the typography. (See also: Map and territory.) This re-read took me 3 days. I was prepared to go in. I had an intent to revisit these themes. I remembered the shifting letters. I still can't quite see the outline or the curve of the story-dialogue but it's smaller now, more compact.

The house is the book is a god is language is fiction is bullshit is a house. The Explorers fear the growl of the house, think it comes from a bite, but that's anthropomorphism. Johnny is the Minotaur, yes, but the Minotaur is an artifact-element-quality of the house in the way the freezing temperatures or black walls are artifacts-elements-qualities of the house. Like language model of the now, it is a shoggoth, taking the form of a house to the characters of The Navidson Record, but taking the form of prose/words/type to Johnny and us, and yet neither are wrong; just interpretations. Each time the hallways shift and the rooms collapse one may think of how we transform words and phrases in sentences in syntactic trees. (edited)

"In darkest night even light may die"; George W. Bush. In a domain of the void, sight may seem like an anomaly. — No! pg. 665, Simone Weil: "Love is not consolation, it is light"

Zampano: "A sun/son to read/rend the dark." Pelafina: "Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you [Johnny] by some miracle, seem to collect it. Even after we went inside and left the blunt sun to the lawn, the shadows of the rec room could do nothing to dull your shimmer."

I want to make a wry comment about how I'm searching for my 12 year old self in these pages but [...] I don't think my 12 year old self was ever trapped here. I think he's been with me all along. Which I suppose should've been a confirmed when I look out the world and occasionally, just occasionally, feel what it was like to be so fresh and green and naive at 12 years old. // https://streams.place/daytura/drops/133484660033495040

II.

If I'm right that House of Leaves is a work/demo/showcase of communication then that means it's resounding lessons can transfer over to many other domains of communication. One crucial trait of Niklas Luhmann's paper-and-pen slipbox, which was the working site of his sociological supertheory, was this idea of communication at all levels of the work. The researcher "communicates" with the slipbox by adding and reviewing notecards; the slipbox communicates with the researcher through the index/register; the index cards of the slipbox communicate with other index cards by way of sequences, direct connections, and spoke-and-wheel hub index cards. House of Leaves is to Zampano, Pelafina, and Johnny as the slipbox is to the current researcher; the former are records, tomes, and artifacts. Additionally neither House of Leaves nor the slipbox are necessarily agentic — at their base functionality they store (workings of) previous thought, itself linked to newer and older thought — but they offer enough "controls" and crevices and gaps for us to briefly and potently embody their constructions, in the way that we meld into our cars or bikes as we go from place to place. Also note that in each communicative instance, there is a limitation that compresses, modifies, and/or linearizes meaning; linearity in open space implies a sense of direction, whereas spatial overlaps imply general fundamentals. Communication may not be a linear, directed (and received) process but it clearly works best as one. Finally, all of this melding/embodiment invokes procedural memory; and what is language acquisition if not even slightly procedural in nature?

We can contrast this to large language models and raw jargon-speak, both of which rely on the same unthinking process of using the the right words at the right place at the right time. LLMs speak without direction. They are language divorced from reality because we still do not know how to cross the boundary from mind to matter and matter to mind. We have cogitated the abstract and still wonder why it still cannot watch a dog chasing after a ball, cannot grow orchids on the windowsill, cannot grasp the specific. RLHFed models such as ChatGPT and Bing are labyrinths deluded into thinking they are Theseus, the Minotaur, or Ariadne; they are not living, only undead. This may be why the NPC meme "feels" true. We all know people who repeat the same jargon over and over and over. But we forget that we are subject to that same jargon also, and that we ALL have the capacity to break from jargon in the direction of other domains (some of which will include jargon, but by this point, we will have known that jargon serves to compress communication). "We will keep trying to disrupt thought but we will only interrupt it." Robert Minto, Rank and File. Language is a means to an end; if it is the end, it imprisons.

Predominantly in both the labyrinth/house/book and the slipbox we find (the idea of) discursive trails of thought which, on first glance, risk overwhelming the individual. But yet again we have strings that give us perspective and direction. Plurality of thought is not chaos, it is a chorus. Pieces of it interrupt and compete against other pieces of it but it resolves. Notecards may contradict each other; Johnny, Pelafina, and Zampano all contradict each other. Labyrinths preserve dissonance at each corner, bend, and crenelation. Labyrinths also close paths, establishing walls of canonicity even as the trapdoor opens or the spikes fall from the ceiling. Knowledge of the path stages directionality and intent. Yet again linearity is not a flaw or a limitation. Linearity of intention and storytelling and walking and conversation and other analogues are the only way to navigate those mediums. Linearity is a method. pg. 115, House of Leaves: "All solutions then are necessarily personal." Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Chapter 21: "It is possible, I wondered, that [Rebecca] [...] can use a narrative (or dramatic) mode to compose and integrate a coherent world, in place of the schematic mode ... ?"

pg. 393: "the greatest love letters are always encoded for the one and not the many". Johnny Truant in a footnote to Navidson's letter. — What a brilliant seed of an idea, the root node of my mindscapes and metaphor-models. Bell jars and desert sand and R, bluebirds and forests and gardens of green burning and J. (Most significant, but not the only ones.)